Friday, 6 May 2011

The above letter and response was published in a short-lived Christian vegetarian periodical, entitled The Better Quest (November, 1911 edition). In the same year, Macmillan founded the society which eventually became Macmillan Cancer Support, as noted by Dr. James Gregory in Of Victorians and Vegetarians (Tauris Academic Studies, 2007).

The London Vegetarian Society published 'Shall I Slay' as a tract by Macmillan in 1909.

Sunday, 1 May 2011

Michael Fryer, who founded the important, if mostly forgotten, Crusade Against All Cruelty to Animals in 1955, wrote of "...the late Basil G. Bourchier, whose church was situated close to my home. This man rarely stood up in his pulpit without making some outspoken reference to the plight of suffering animals and man's inhumanity towards them. Far from causing people to turn away from his services, it had the opposite effect. Although his church was in size 'a young cathedral', one could not get a seat in his heyday unless one was there at least an hour before the service began."

Acknowledgements

In most cases the above excerpts have appeared in Vegetarian Society journals dating back to 1849. It is with thanks to the VS for their generous policy towards the reproduction of archive material that this project exists.